Love Hitch. Rear Window is astonishing. Vertigo is remarkable. But his best films toy with viewpoint and film technique. With an excellent script he can provide the additional satisfaction of cultural commentary or layered meaning.
This offers little in the way of any of those things. The script is the major problem. For 40 minutes all development proceeds along a single anticipated line: each new test will positively i.d. Manny (Fonda) as the culprit in a string of crimes. But when you give your movie the title "the Wrong Man," you've tipped off the audience about both the theme, and the protagonists culpability. You don't need such a sober, laborious setup! It's so plodding that your mind is already trying to read allegorical meaning into it after ten minutes. The score literalizes obvious points and underscores mundane visuals (shoes?) with tension. The music cues might have worked in a half hour television format, which is I suspect where the problem originates.
For various reasons Fonda and Vera Miles would never be the leads in another Hitch movie. Miles got pregnant. Fonda is miscast. He may be the least Italian person you could give the part to. He's too articulate and middle-class to play someone mired in red-tape because he can't explain himself better. This is also due to the minority-erasing casting of Fonda. It would be feasible that a non-white person would have a hard time explaining themselves. Fonda, who disliked the Method just recites the script sincerely. His performance has no arc whatsoever. Emotionally, his reaction to being arrested and humiliated is not so different from riding a bus. Nothing registers; it's like looking at a prop for 90 minutes. If he can't get excited about his own fate, how can a viewer? Mad magazine spoofed this back in the sixties as the dullest treatment of an endless series of ordinary moments. It was an unusually perceptive piece.
There are several moments in Hitch's career where he tries to escape his genre and meets resistance. There's the mediocre comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There are his historical pictures Jamaica Inn and Under Capricorn. And then there's this; an attempt to play one of his favorite themes straight, without a wink to the audience.
It feels like an early test of naturalistic filming that he'd show off again in Psycho. It's a very anti-Hollywood film. It's filmed very crisply. Coming from anyone other than Hitchcock, it might have worked.
This offers little in the way of any of those things. The script is the major problem. For 40 minutes all development proceeds along a single anticipated line: each new test will positively i.d. Manny (Fonda) as the culprit in a string of crimes. But when you give your movie the title "the Wrong Man," you've tipped off the audience about both the theme, and the protagonists culpability. You don't need such a sober, laborious setup! It's so plodding that your mind is already trying to read allegorical meaning into it after ten minutes. The score literalizes obvious points and underscores mundane visuals (shoes?) with tension. The music cues might have worked in a half hour television format, which is I suspect where the problem originates.
For various reasons Fonda and Vera Miles would never be the leads in another Hitch movie. Miles got pregnant. Fonda is miscast. He may be the least Italian person you could give the part to. He's too articulate and middle-class to play someone mired in red-tape because he can't explain himself better. This is also due to the minority-erasing casting of Fonda. It would be feasible that a non-white person would have a hard time explaining themselves. Fonda, who disliked the Method just recites the script sincerely. His performance has no arc whatsoever. Emotionally, his reaction to being arrested and humiliated is not so different from riding a bus. Nothing registers; it's like looking at a prop for 90 minutes. If he can't get excited about his own fate, how can a viewer? Mad magazine spoofed this back in the sixties as the dullest treatment of an endless series of ordinary moments. It was an unusually perceptive piece.
There are several moments in Hitch's career where he tries to escape his genre and meets resistance. There's the mediocre comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There are his historical pictures Jamaica Inn and Under Capricorn. And then there's this; an attempt to play one of his favorite themes straight, without a wink to the audience.
It feels like an early test of naturalistic filming that he'd show off again in Psycho. It's a very anti-Hollywood film. It's filmed very crisply. Coming from anyone other than Hitchcock, it might have worked.